As Floods Ebb in Prague, Threat Rolls Into Germany

By PETER S. GREEN with OTTO POHL

Published: August 15, 2002

PRAGUE, Aug. 14—
Floods that have caused billions of dollars of damage across Central Europe and have shut down the Czech Republic's biggest tourist attractions also did something almost unheard of today -- they stopped the production of the Czechs' two most famous beers, Pilsner and the original Budweiser.

As floodwaters slowly began to recede in the historic center of Prague, heavy flooding threatened the southeast German cultural capital of Dresden, where Italian paintings and other artworks in the world famous Zwinger Palace gallery were left in a flooded basement, and where the Semper Opera will remain closed for weeks. City authorities prepared to evacuate thousands of residents and hospital patients with military helicopters if needed.

Grimly, political leaders began to count the cost. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, who faces a tough re-election battle in September, traveled to heavily flooded areas in the former East Germany and announced about $380 million in swift aid.

''Ten years' work has been destroyed in a night,'' the chancellor said as he toured Grimma, a small town that had been renovated after reunification in 1990 but was severely flooded this week.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech president, was criticized for remaining on vacation in sun-drenched Portugal while some of his country's most historic areas were submerged. He returned to Prague, and he toured the flooded district of Holesovice today.

Noticing a submerged pub, he turned to a local resident and said, ''You have a pub right here, but you can't even get yourselves a beer.''

The taps may run dry, however, for a different reason: In the western town of Plzen, and the southern town of Ceske Budejovice, home of the original Budweiser, breweries stopped production this week because of the flooding.

There was no estimate of how long production would be suspended, nor of the cost of the flooding to infrastructure and to Czech tourism, which has proven a boon to the economy since the 1989 Velvet Revolution overthrew Communism and brought Mr. Havel to power.

Normally, thousands of tourists flock each day to towns like Cesky Krumlov, a Renaissance jewel in the south of the country. But its historic center is underwater and unlikely to receive tourists for the rest of the season, and the annual summer music festival there has been canceled, officials said.

Elsewhere in Central Europe, Austrian authorities continued to struggle to contain the the Danube River, which has overflowed in several places, halting shipping.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups tried to portray the flooding as a direct consequence of human-caused global warming, blaming oil companies.

Many scientists said that the summer storms that swamped Prague and other parts of Europe, as well as South Asia, are consistent with rainfall patterns expected in a warming climate. Predictions call for more downpours. But experts stressed that no single storm, or single stormy season for that matter, could be singled out as linked to human alteration of the atmosphere.

The progressive paving over of Europe's increasingly urbanized landscape has also left water no place to go but downstream and downhill.

In Germany, where 12 people have died in the floods of recent days, workers in Dresden scrambled to save the precious artworks at the Zwinger Palace gallery. About 4,000 paintings were rushed to higher floors from basement storerooms, but the larger canvases could not be moved, museum officials said.

''We've got four enormous Italians trapped in the basement,'' said Uta Neidhard, an art curator at Zwinger Palace. She said those paintings had been lashed to the basement ceiling in hopes the waters would not rise that high. They included a work by Paolo Veronese, a 16th century Italian painter.

The gallery will be closed for the foreseeable future, and the Semper Opera House, where floodwater has been pumped out of the basement, will not reopen for eight weeks, said Volker Butzmann, the opera's technical director.

More than 200,000 Czechs have been forced to flee their homes this week in the worst floods for more than a century.

''It's as if somebody decided to wash this country away,'' a young Czech woman told a friend as she stood near a flood barrier in Prague early yesterday afternoon.

Environment Minister Libor Ambrozek said the damages from the floods could exceed 20 billion crowns, or about $632 million.

Although the waters began to recede in Prague late this evening, the danger moved swiftly down the Elbe River. Water was rising about a foot an hour at Usti nad Labem near the German border, and soldiers blew up a river barge that threatened to crash into a bridge near Litomerice, downstream from Prague.

In Roudnice nad Labem, another Czech town on the Elbe, a television reporter pointed to the waters rising in the 18th century town and said, ''Every 10 minutes it is worse and worse.''

This morning, the sun finally emerged around mid-morning in Prague, glinting of the city's many golden-topped spires and roofs, as some of the 14,000 civil defense workers mobilized around the country to fight the floods watched the swollen Vltava River slowly recede. Volunteers rushed to plug waters pouring in through backed up storm sewers, which flooded low-lying areas inland from the river.